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WaPo editorial: The U.S. insurance model doesn’t work
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-lane-the-us-insurance-model-doesnt-work/2014/02/10/0cb7f8f4-9277-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.htmlNor did he risk a consistent attack on the cherished idea of earned benefits in general or as it applied to health care. Sometimes, as in a speech last September, Obama depicted health coverage as a right. Yet in his first address to Congress as president in 2009, he spoke of it mainly as a means of reducing costs. He balked at a “public option.” He opposed an individual mandate in his 2008 campaign, then enacted one as president.
So when the CBO confirmed that Obamacare would enable some people to cut back on their work effort and still qualify for health coverage, subsidized by the taxes of those who continue working, it had the feel of an unmasking.
The whole point of any universal-coverage plan is to break the link between work and insurance. But Obamacare was never clearly advertised in those terms, notwithstanding the administration’s after-the-fact efforts to explain why the CBO report was no big deal.
Republicans were bound to pounce on the CBO report — and many voters were bound to agree with them. Yet this is likely to prove at most a tactical victory for the GOP, and possibly a pyrrhic one. The earned-benefits approach does have advantages; quite often, in fact, as the successful bipartisan reforms that linked welfare to work during the Clinton administration show.
Linking health insurance to work, however, is a bad idea: There’s just no necessary connection between how much you work and your risk of needing care. Eventually, the United States must move from a categorical approach to health insurance to a more universal one, whether through Obamacare or some less-convoluted plan.
10 replies
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or quit working 3 shit-jobs. The nerve. 
"some people to cut back on their work effort and still qualify for health coverage, subsidized by the taxes of those who continue working, it had the feel of an unmasking..."
